Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Couple were buried holding hands 1500 years ago, archaeologists find

Italian archaeologists have discovered a pair of skeletons still holding hands after being buried about 1,500 years ago. The man and woman were buried at the same time between the 5th and 6th century A.D. near the Italian city of Modena. Wearing a bronze ring, the woman is positioned so she appears to be gazing at her male partner.

“We believe that they were originally buried with their faces staring into each other. The position of the man’s vertebrae suggests that his head rolled after death,” Donato Labate, the director of the excavation at the archaeological superintendence of Emilia-Romagna, told Discovery News.